Healing Touch
by SabaceanBabe
Summary: Annie Cresta teaches Finnick Odair the value of a hug.


Once upon a time, there was a boy. He was a beautiful boy, tall for his age and strong, bronze of hair and green of eye and with skin kissed by the sun. He had his whole life before him, a loving family, and many friends. Warm and funny, almost everyone wanted to be with this beautiful boy. His future was bright with promise.

But one fateful day, everything changed. The beautiful boy was reaped for the Hunger Games. The stunned crowd watched as he walked bravely up the steps to the stage to join the girl who would be his district partner. She had volunteered to replace the girl whose name was called before his, a girl who was not so popular and who was older than the boy yet still deemed too young to be reaped. The boy walked straight and tall up those steps and wondered why no one volunteered for him.

During the week before the Games, the boy did well. Everyone wanted to be his friend and the people of the Capitol loved him. His stylist and prep team told him over and over how beautiful he was, touching him constantly. During his tribute interview, the smiling man with the purple hair fawned over him and hugged him at least three times, telling him how much the Capitol wanted him to win. The boy was very uncomfortable with it all, but he smiled and pretended it was okay, just like his mentor told him to; she said it would help him to win, but she didn't say how.

The boy was in the arena for ten days. He killed six children, all older than him. He kept every parachute his mentor sent him, morbid souvenirs; he didn't know why. There were twenty-three of them, and they had delivered everything from food and medicine to the golden trident he'd used to kill four of his victims. He kept the trident, too.

Once they released him from the hospital, the party the Capitol threw for him lasted for three full days. The boy was only fourteen, but the people of the Capitol treated him like an adult; it wasn't just the smiling talk show host who fawned over him. Alcohol and drugs flowed freely, and although he wanted to, the boy couldn't refuse it all. He didn't know what to do, how to act, how to _be_. He wanted to go home.

But when he was finally allowed to go home, he quickly learned that he no longer belonged there. He kept his family awake at night, because when he slept at all, he woke screaming, reliving the arena, seeing and hearing the boys and girls he'd killed. He tried to go back to school, though he didn't have to, but his friends didn't know what to do or how to act or how to _be _around him, and so they avoided him. His teachers mostly acted like he wasn't there, and when they did notice him, it was obvious they were afraid. His attempt to return to school failed miserably, and so the boy went to work with his father, fishing in the gulf.

Winter came and brought with it the boy's victory tour of the nation. His stylist and prep team descended on his house on the victors' island, gushing over how much he'd grown, how his body was filling out, and how he had grown even more beautiful in the months since his Games. The Capitol would just eat him up, they said. He didn't see how that could be a good thing.

The boy endured the time on the road with gritted teeth behind a fake smile. The people of the districts hated him, pitied him, envied him. The people of the Capitol loved him, adored him, wanted him. They couldn't stop touching him. The boy endured that as he did everything else, with a smile and a laugh, but he learned to hate being touched.

The boy returned home. He fished and mended nets with his father. He learned the things he would have learned from school from his mentor, instead. He grew taller, stronger, filled out more. But still the nightmares visited every time he slept, and they included strangers touching him along with the whispers and screams of the dead. Reaping Day came again, and this time he spent it on the stage instead of with the other boys his age. The Capitol man called a girl from the eighteen year olds and a boy from the fourteens; an older boy volunteered. Fifteen now, the boy watched with resentment as the younger boy's friends gathered around him, glad of his reprieve.

The boy shadowed his district's mentors during the Games; he would be a mentor himself the following year. He went to the Hunger Games parties, one of his duties as a victor, where he was surrounded by men and women who gave him things his parents would never approve of, who told him how beautiful he was. They greeted him with hugs and handshakes that lasted too long and watched him with hungry eyes, and the boy endured it all with a smile and wished he were home.

The week before the boy's sixteenth birthday, a creamy envelope with elegant blue lettering arrived from the Capitol. The president himself invited the boy and his parents to attend a party in the president's own home to celebrate the boy's birthday. When the day came, a hovercraft arrived to take them all there.

The party was a success. Everyone had a good time, although the boy's parents looked on with disapproval at how popular the boy had become. After the party, while his parents slept, the boy learned what it really meant to be a victor whom the Capitol loved. The president himself told the boy if he didn't continue to smile, to accept his new reality with grace and even enthusiasm, his parents, his family would pay the price. The boy did as he was told, and when he was finally allowed to return home, he burned the parachutes he'd taken from the arena and threw the golden trident into the sea.

Time passed. The boy became a man, more beautiful and more beloved of the Capitol than ever before. As the Capitol's love for him grew, so did the man's hatred, hidden behind his brilliant smile. He hated the Capitol, hated what they did to his people, the same thing they did to him but on a grander scale. Most of all he hated himself for letting it happen, again and again.

The Games came and went and came and went, always the same, until one day it wasn't. A young girl was reaped; an older girl volunteered. Although the girl broke in the arena, still she survived it to become a victor. The boy, now a man, mourned; he knew what was coming for her.

But what he feared didn't come to pass, at least not right away. The girl came to the victors' island to live. She walked with the boy along the beach, and they talked. The girl slowly recovered from the arena. She and the boy's mentor grew close, they laughed and they danced and they hugged, and the boy envied them their easy affection. He had long since learned to hate being touched.

Days turned to weeks turned to months. Drawn like a moth to the flame, the boy spent as much time as he could circling the girl, coming ever closer, but not close enough to touch. He wanted her, and he was ashamed.

One day, as the boy and the girl walked along the beach, she took his hand in hers. He fought to not jerk away, but she noticed and let him go. He wanted to sink beneath the sand, but she laughed at something – he didn't know what for he only had eyes for her – and he found that he wanted to stay.

The next day, she took his hand again, and he flinched again, but this time she didn't let go. He didn't pull away. Day after day, they walked hand in hand, and always it was the girl who took his in hers, until one day it wasn't.

The boy returned to the Capitol and his lovers there. The Capitol's touch stained the boy, the man, made him unfit for any decent person's touch. He smiled and he endured and he dreamed of a girl with the sea in her eyes and a laugh that could melt the most frozen of hearts; he longed for the feel of her hand in his and hated himself for it.

When the boy went home after weeks in the muck, he didn't want the girl to come near, didn't want to stain her as he had been stained. The girl, though, merely laughed and took his hand and led him down the beach to help her rescue a nest of newly hatched turtles. The boy followed where she led and he began to heal.

One day the girl didn't join him on the beach. The morning was warm, the breeze and the birds were playful, and the sea was a rich blue-green. It was exactly the kind of day the girl never missed, and the boy knew something was wrong. He went to her house and found all the doors and windows open, the curtains fluttering in the breeze. She sat rocking on the floor in the middle of her kitchen, curled into a tight ball, and she didn't respond when he called her name.

Not knowing what else to do, the boy sat down beside her. He didn't touch her, but he did talk to her. He told her about the sky and the sea and the birds outside her house and he told her about the colors and strangely beautiful things he saw in the Capitol. She stopped rocking, her body relaxed, and he knew she listened. He kept talking, and she shifted closer to him, and eventually he felt her cold fingers seek the warmth of his. The sun was low in the sky when the girl kissed his cheek and laid her head on his shoulder. The boy didn't pull away.

The girl was there on the beach the next morning, waiting for him in the rain. Her long hair was plastered to her shoulders and her back, her dress clung wetly to her skin, soaked through, but she had never looked more beautiful to him; as soon as the boy had that thought, he turned away. What had beauty ever gotten him? How could he think that way about this girl who had come to mean so much to him?

The boy walked away, and he told himself he couldn't see the beach in front of him because of the rain. He had become an expert at lying, especially to himself.

The girl caught up to him, though, and took his hand in hers. He stopped walking and allowed her to turn him around to face her. She traced the tracks the rain made on his face – rain, never tears – and then she stepped closer, brought her body slowly flush with his. She held his gaze with hers, not letting go as she reached up and wrapped her arms, surprisingly strong, around the boy's shoulders. He stiffened at the touch, but she held him tightly, nestled her face into his neck; he felt her warm breath against his skin and it was nothing at all like the men and women of the Capitol.

The boy didn't know how long they stood that way, the rain falling on them all the while, but when she started to pull away from him, he wrapped his arms around her. He never wanted to let her go.


End file.
